Innovation

Local innovation and global value chains in developing countries

Local innovation and global value chains in developing countries

UNU-MERIT Working Papers #2015-022

with Valentina De Marchi and Elisa Giuliani

This working paper is part of a collaborative research effort of UNIDO and UNU‐MERIT. It has been commissioned as a background paper for the UNIDO Industrial Development Report 2016. In this study we undertake a systematic review of the literature on GVCs in developing countries to investigate if and how innovation has been undertaken at the local level.

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Is Co-Invention Expediting Technological Catch Up? A Study of Collaboration between Emerging Country Firms and EU inventors

Papers in Innovation Studies #25 CIRCLE – Lund University

with Elisa Giuliani and Arianna Martinelli

Firms from emerging countries such as Brazil, India, and China (BIC) are going global, and Europe is attracting around one-third of their direct outward investments. Growing internationalization constitutes an opportunity for technological catch up. In this paper we analyze BIC firms’ cross-border inventions with European Union (EU-27) actors, during the period 1990-2012. Our results suggest that cross-border inventions represent an opportunity for BIC firms to accumulate technological capabilities, access frontier knowledge, and appropriate the property rights of co-inventions.

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Clusters and Innovation in the Caribbean

Clusters and Innovation in the Caribbean

VII Americas Competitiveness Forum in Port of Spain, Trinidad.

I gave a keynote speech on clusters in the Caribbean.Understanding the characteristics of clusters in the Caribbean and defining policies for their development is the basis of a timely and thought-provoking study commissioned by Compete Caribbean.

Download the pdf Trinidad Caribbean Clusters

Download the full report

 

Emerging-market MNEs investing in Europe. A typology of subsidiary global–local connections

Emerging-market MNEs investing in Europe. A typology of subsidiary global–local connections

International Business Review, 23(4): 680-691

The article is co-authored with Elisa Giuliani, Sara Gorgoni and Cristina Guenther.

It empirically investigates how subsidiaries of multinationals from both emerging (EMNEs) and advanced (AMNEs) economies investing in Europe learn from the local context and contribute to it as much as they benefit from it. To explore this we classify the behavior of MNE subsidiaries into different typologies on the basis of how knowledge is transferred within the multinational and on the nature of the local innovative connections. The empirical analysis relies on an entirely new, subsidiary-level dataset in the industrial machinery sector in Italy and Germany. Results show that EMNEs and AMNEs undertake different strategies for tapping into local knowledge and for transferring it within the company. We identify a new typology of EMNE subsidiary that contributes through its significant local innovative efforts to development processes in the host country. This result suggests possible win-win situations from which novel policy implications may be drawn.

The article has been reviewed in the Rising Powers Blog.

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My book about the changing geography of wine production

My book about the changing geography of wine production

«This book overturns the old paradigm ideas about natural-resource-based activities.
It sheds light on the new opportunities for technological dynamism and catching-up by using science to open novel directions in traditional sectors. It should become a classic in what I expect will be a very important academic debate
and a new trend in
development policy

Carlota Perez
Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia; Cambridge University and University of Sussex, UK


«This excellent book demonstrates better than any other I know the strengths and limits of the concept of a national system of innovation for understanding economic development today.
Any careful student of innovation or development will want to read it.
»

Charles Sabel
Columbia Law School, USA

Innovation Drivers, Value Chains and the Geography of Multinational Corporations in Europe

Innovation Drivers, Value Chains and the Geography of Multinational Corporations in Europe

Journal of Economic Geography, forthcoming

The article is co-authored with Riccardo Crescenzi and Carlo Pietrobelli.

It investigates the geography of multinational companies’ investments in the EU regions. The ‘traditional’ sources of location advantages (i.e. agglomeration economies, market access and labour market conditions) are considered together with innovation and socio-institutional drivers of investments, captured by means of regional “social filter” conditions. This makes it possible to empirically assess the different role played by such advantages in the location decision of investments at different stages of the value chain and disentangle the differential role of national vs. regional factors. The empirical analysis covers the EU-25 regions and suggests that regional socio- economic conditions are crucially important for the location decisions of investments in the most sophisticated knowledge-intensive stages of the value chain.

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